But the company isn't out of the woods yet. Revenue still declined 2% overall.

IBM is banking on several areas to help it grow again: cloud, mobile, and big data.

And it had good news to report on all of those fronts, too. Mobile revenue is up 100%, it says, though didn't give the actual revenue number. Cloud revenue us up more than 50% year-to-date, it says, with hosted services on track to be a $2.8 billion business this year. Big data is up 7% this year, and security revenue up more than 20% year-to-date.

Today's earnings did nothing to calm those fears. Revenues from its microprocessor chip unit were down a big 18% over the year-ago quarter.

Revenues from Power Systems, which use IBM's homegrown Power chips, were down 28%. Plus storage was down 12%, and the unit IBM has agreed to sell to Lenovo, System x, was down 3%. All told, revenues from the hardware unit, Systems and Technology, were $3.3 billion for the quarter, down 11% from the year-ago quarter.

And that means that despite the good progress report, investors are feeling cautious. Shares were down slightly, not quite 2%, in after-hours trading.